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Planning for the future: Technology advances fertility options

Elizabeth Higgins Clark took steps toward starting her family this year. She is single, 30, and a working actress living in Los Angeles.

She has 24 “potential children” waiting for fertilization. They are her eggs, which a specialist extracted from her ovaries, then carefully washed and subjected them to flash freezing. She pays monthly for their care and will likely do so for several years before the eggs are fertilized and implanted in her womb.

“It’s strange. … I think about them,” she said. “I think about how I am already eight months older than they are. I wonder how they are.”

Clark made the decision to freeze her eggs after realizing that her eggs were growing older just as she was.

“Any (birthday) that ends in 0 makes you think about a lot of things,” she said. She grew concerned that if she waited too long to start a family, she might have trouble conceiving and might even need an egg donor.

“I started doing research about it. I was like, I could be my own egg donor,” she said.

Cold reality

Many women decide to freeze their eggs before beginning chemotherapy because the therapy can degrade their eggs, said Dr. David Kallenberger, an ob-gyn and fertility specialist at Integris Health.

As opposed to freezing embryos, freezing eggs has only recently become clinically successful.

“Initially, they tried to freeze eggs, but during the freeze process the eggs would crystallize, so they’d be nonviable,” he said.

But vitrification, or flash freezing, makes egg freezing viable.

“Through vitrification of eggs, they found that the eggs didn’t crystallize. They thawed nicely and were able to be injected or fertilized with sperm, depending on the situation,” Kallenberger said.

Clark decided to have her eggs frozen for several reasons. She was working hard to build her acting career and wasn’t ready for children. She feared missing her window of opportunity and felt her biological clock ticking. And she didn’t want to ever feel pressured to rush into a relationship in order to have a family as she’d seen many other women do.

Clark hopes to eventually get married and have two children. But she’s not ready for that just yet.

“I wanted to give myself the best chance of not having to do that later,” she said. “It was a proactive decision, and I can understand why people would question why I would do it. But I just kind of knew that I wanted that insurance policy.”

Some corporations, including Apple and Facebook, have added insurance coverage for elective egg freezing to their employees’ health policies.

Finding answers

While egg freezing has only been viable for a few years, doctors have been freezing embryos for two decades, especially in connection with in vitro fertilization.

Becky and Kyle Endicott, both 35, of Edmond, have five embryos cryogenically stored. Their frozen embryos are stored by Integris Bennett Fertility Institute, 3433 NW 56 St., Suite 200, where they underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive their second child, Julia, now 10 months old. When Becky Endicott found herself dealing with infertility, she said she quickly learned it is a disease without a ribbon color, without a spokesperson, without a walkathon. It’s whispered about, not discussed, she said. Even family members tiptoed around the subject, not wanting to upset her.

“What I was craving was to talk about it with somebody. To find a group of people that were facing the same thing that I was,” Endicott said. She and her husband went through a battery of tests to determine the problem; he was fertile, she was not. Her doctor told her she is part of the “one in three enigma” — the group of infertile women for which the cause of infertility is unknown.

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The Endicotts struggled with infertility for years, finally deciding on in vitro fertilization to conceive. They went through rounds of expensive drugs, then her eggs were extracted and fertilized. Her doctor implanted two of the strongest embryos. Nine months later, along came baby Julia.

They’d been through the same process five years ago, when trying to conceive their first child, Sophia, but surprisingly became pregnant while taking a break from the in vitro process.

Big decisions

Now, the couple have a big decision to make. What to do with the five remaining embryos? They think their family is complete with two daughters.

Bennett Fertility Institute has a policy against destroying frozen embryos — a policy with which the Endicotts strongly agree.

They could have the embryos implanted during an “off time” in Becky’s cycle, when the embryos would theoretically be absorbed by her body. But that option comes with the possibility of pregnancy.

The Endicotts have decided to keep the five embryos frozen for a few more years. Then they’ll likely donate them to an out-of-state family struggling with infertility. They thought about donating their embryos to one of the many couples they met while going through the in vitro process, but decided against that idea.

They thought they’d have difficulty seeing their biological children being raised by other parents. They worried they’d judge another couple’s parenting style. They also didn’t know how they’d feel seeing a strong resemblance between their daughters and any other children that might result from their donation.

In California, actress Clark may one day face a similar difficult decision regarding her frozen eggs. It’s something she likely considers at times, just as she thinks about those potential children, waiting to be born. She sees elective egg freezing as strongly pro-family.

The Endicotts said they think Clark’s decision, though very personal, is likely a good option for many women who may face infertility or who are not ready for children psychologically, though their bodies may be.